Читать книгу The Tank Corps - Clough Williams-Ellis - Страница 15

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So, while our shells were making, we built Tanks. And Fate, whose taste in humour is not ours, and who knew what we did not, namely, that the Tank and prolonged artillery preparation are alternative weapons, decreed that both shells and Tanks should be ready for the Somme offensive.

It was thus upon a “substructure” of the new artillery preparation that we gaily imposed the Tank. We were to take fourteen months in working out the proposition that they could never be effectively used together.

The Tanks had been designed for the sort of conditions which had prevailed at Loos. Their training grounds had been carefully modelled on the “Loos” pattern. By the time Tanks could be put into the field, a year later, our artillery superiority had completely changed the nature of the fighting.

At Beaumont-Hamel in November 1916, for example, we fired off as much ammunition as was expended in three weeks at the Battle of Loos.

On the Somme—owing to our having advanced—four miles of churned-up, shell-pitted ground had to be crossed before the front line could be reached. It had also—to state the case after the manner of the author of Erewhon—become the fashion, just before the day of battle, for the attacking side to blast the ground which they were about to cross to the condition of plum pudding on stir-up Sunday. This blasting process, moreover, necessarily gave the enemy several days’ warning of any proposed attack.

It had also incidentally had another effect upon the industrious German. When we were bombarded our chief idea was retaliation; when the German was shelled he dug.

So it had come about that on the Somme, everywhere behind the German lines, were great electrically-lit and comfortably warmed dug-outs, where a company or so could lie secure thirty or forty feet below ground and there wait for the bombardment to “blow over.” Then they would emerge ready to welcome our infantry. Thus the system of the, say, six days’ artillery preparation, though it did very much to raise our moral and depress that of the enemy in time resulted in an almost complete system of enemy counter-measures, and in a state of the battle-ground which caused attackers and attacked to be almost immobile. The system, necessary as had been our adoption of it, had not solved the problem of the deadlock.

The Tank, as we have said, had been intended for use on reasonably sound ground. It was also to be a surprise weapon. Not once for the next fourteen months did we omit to give the enemy at least five days’ notice of our proposed attacks, nor did we decline to co-operate with his artillery in reducing the intended battle-ground to a morass. It was, therefore, not till the First Battle of Cambrai, when we did adopt other tactics, that Tanks came by their own.